My external harddrive went bonkers a few days ago . I contacted western digital and was told they should get it running again or since it was still under warranty they would replace it free of charge. My problem is if they do fix it and see my 450 movies and 1500 hundred songs and the winmx program that I have on it, will they turn me in and have the man coming to my door taking me to court and big fines. One guess where most of this came from. So I guess the question is will I be safe if I send it in for repair or should I just eat the drive and by another one.

Jump on the net and check out their privacy policy.Also I'm not sure what the privacy laws are where you are, but I think in most places it is illegal for them to hand over information about you (their customer) to a third party. Check out your local privacy laws.

I would forget about the contents of the drive as they are not likely to fix your drive and hand it back to you, what normally happens is if the drive has to go as far as the manufacturer its normally so they can see what went wrong and swap it out for a repaired one on a production line method, this means they can have a fast turn around, if they fixed your exact drive to return to you it would take them a lot longer to do all this and keep track of folks personal data, simply erasing all the drives contents shields both them and you from any liability for the drives contents, btw simply having the winmx program on your drive does not mean you used it to download any files, nor that you dont actually have all those files on the drive as a backup repository for your collection of media as many folks do, and on a final note unless your selling those files or otherwise allowing unauthorised access to them for profit you haven't actually broken any laws in downloading them, as I often point out its uploading them to others that incurs the legal wrath not downloading for your own usage and research.

What do you mean by bunkers? I have had 3 WD drives that have failed in the past year, and I was able to retrieve almost all data from those drives. Did the drive motor go out or is the motor working, but you can not see your data? If the motor is running does it make a klunk klunk sound? If the motor is still running then I believe you may be able to get all your data back. You will have to buy another external drive to copy the data to though. After you rescue your data then you can secure erase the drive using a free program called eraser or another program of your choice. This is probably an option if your drive motor is still working. I bought a program called file scavenger, and retrieved all my data. I like it the most, but there are other free ones available like Recuva that may do the job. Anyways if the drive motor is working at least scan it with your free option Recuva to see if you can see the data, and report back what you have found.